Three airlines were involved in a major mess-up when an unaccompanied minor was nearly put on the wrong flight to the wrong country.
14-year-old Anton Berg from Raleigh, North Carolina, was en route to Sweden on Sunday, 30 June for the holidays to attend a summer camp and visit his grandparents.
From Raleigh-Durham International Airport, Berg landed at Newark Liberty International in New Jersey where he was meant to catch a connecting flight to Sweden via a Swedish airline operator.
According to the teen’s mother, Brenda Berg, her son is an experienced traveller, and she didn’t see the need to register him as an unaccompanied minor. United Airlines, however, contacted her to say that he had been sequestered in a room for other minors. The United Airlines policy for minors includes children aged 5 to 14 years, but the Bergs had booked a code-share flight through SAS, a Swedish airline whose policy stipulates that only children of 11 years and under count as minors on flights.
Brenda was contacted by United Airlines to inform her that she needed to pay the fees for flying an unaccompanied minor, which was arranged, but her son was then escorted onto the wrong flight (headed to Dusseldorf) without a ticket when an United Airlines staff member misheard a final boarding call for a different minor with a similar name on a Eurowings-operated flight.
Anton messaged his mother to say that something wasn’t right, and the Eurowings plane parked at the end of the runway eventually returned. However by this time the boy’s actual SAS flight had already departed, and it was too late.
Stuck at the airport, the teenager was eventually booked himself onto the next available flight to Sweden via Copenhagen, Denmark, and arrived in Sweden seven hours later than initially planned.
Throughout this saga, Anton’s mother frantically and furiously tried to get hold of United Airlines and the staff at the New Jersey airport. Despite trying to make phone calls and sending direct tweets to both parties alerting the airline as to what went wrong and asking where her son was, she struggled to get through to anyone.
A thread of tweets give a sense of just how stressful a night Brenda Berg had:
Berg’s eventual frustration and apathy towards the American airline may seem like a rant or a bit of a smear campaign directed towards United Airlines, but the situation is altogether stressful and quite serious considering that any given minor could have been sent astray.
Image: Unsplash
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